Global features

Curiosity Mars rover finds soil similar to Hawaii’s

Mars rover starts ‘to eat dirt’ Cosmic coincidence on the road to Glenelg Mars rover finds ‘unusual rock’ Nasa's Curiosity rover has found soil on Mars to be similar to Hawaii's after sifting and scanning its first sample on the Red Planet.

The robot's CheMin instrument shook out fine particles of soil and fired X-rays at them to determine their composition.

These sandy samples should give clues about Mars’ recent geological history.

As had been theorised, much of the sample is made of weathered “basaltic” materials of volcanic origin, like that seen on the islands of Hawaii.

The sample seems to contain dust carried from afar by Mars’ global-scale storms, as well as coarser sand of more local provenance.

The £2.6bn mission put Curiosity on the floor of Gale Crater, a huge depression on Mars’ equator, on 6 August.

It has since trundled more than 480m (1,590ft) to the east toward a spot called Glenelg, a place that satellite images indicate is an interesting junction between three different geological terrains.

But it has been paused by the Curiosity team at a region dubbed “Rocknest” to get its first taste of Martian soil.

This first analysis served to “cleanse the palate” of the rover's sample collection systems, which may have brought contaminants from Earth that would skew its chemical view of the Red Planet.

But with that out of the way, Curiosity accomplished another first: the first-ever use of X-ray diffraction on another planet.

Soil samples are first sieved to sequester particles of less than 150 micrometres in size X-ray diffraction is a well-established approach on Earth, in which a focussed beam of X-rays is either bounced off a sample, giving strong hints both of what kinds of atoms are in a sample and any crystalline structures that they may be locked in.

The CheMin experiment first sieves down a soil sample, separating out the components smaller than 150 micrometres - about the width of two human hairs.

It then gives this sifted soil a shake while firing X-rays at it, examining just how they propagate.

The team says the sample contains “significant amounts” of the minerals feldspar, olivine and pyroxene.

“So far, the materials Curiosity has analysed are consistent with our initial ideas of the deposits in Gale Crater, recording a transition through time from a wet to dry environment,” said David Bish, co-investigator on the CheMin experiment.

In the weeks since its arrival on Mars, the rover has already put its ChemCam and APXS instruments to work examining larger rocks, including a never-before-seen specimen reported earlier in October.

“The ancient rocks, such as the conglomerates, suggest flowing water, while the minerals in the younger soil are consistent with limited interaction with water,” said Dr Bish.

AFP

Coral genomes under microscope in climate race

Researchers from Australia and Saudi Arabia launched a project Thursday which they hope will help them understand the genetic makeup of corals and how they react to climate change.

Reefs around the world are under threat from bleaching due to climate change, as well as storms and predatory starfish, and scientists want to learn more about coral resilience to help head off further destruction.

To help achieve this, they have launched an international sequencing project, Sea-quence, backed by Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, which will explore the genomes of 10 coral species.

It hopes to uncover core genetic data for Great Barrier Reef and Red Sea corals and use the information to help protect them from climate change.

“Climate change places coral reefs at risk through warmer water temperatures and more acidic oceans,” said Great Barrier Reef Foundation chairman John Schubert.

“Unfortunately our knowledge of coral resilience, their capacity to adapt and the circumstances under which they can adapt to climate change is limited.

“Through Sea-quence we can start to bridge this critical knowledge gap by generating data on a wide scale across the Great Barrier Reef and the Red Sea.”

Russell Reichelt, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said that presently only two coral species in the world have had their DNA sequenced.

“This research project will sequence the genomes of 10 coral species -- providing five times the data currently available and identify which genes help corals adapt to climate change, and which species contain these genes,” he said.

Last month, a key study found that the Great Barrier Reef -- the world’s largest -- had lost more than half its coral cover in the past 27 years and warned it could halve again by 2022 if trends continued.

The study said cyclone intensities were increasing as the world’s oceans warmed and bleaching deaths would “almost certainly increase” as a result of climate changes.

Xabier Irigoyen, director of the Red Sea Research Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, will be heading up the effort to sequence the Red Sea species.

AFP

Last of Nepal’s Kusunda speakers mourns dying language

As Gyani Maiya Sen nears the end of her life she worries that her final words may the last ever spoken in her mysterious mother tongue.

The 76-year-old, part of a vanishing tribe in remote western Nepal, is the only surviving speaker of Kusunda, a language of unknown origins and unique sentence structures that has long baffled experts.

“There’s no one else with whom I can speak in my language. I used to speak with my mother but since her death in 1985, I am left alone,” she told AFP by telephone.

Yet the frail, gnarled tribeswoman is the focus of renewed interest among linguists across the world who are trying to ensure her language survives in some form after she has gone.

Sen’s Kusunda tribe, now just 100 members strong, were once a nomadic people but she has found herself living out her twilight years in a concrete bungalow built by local authorities in Dang district, western Nepal.

“How can I forget the language I grew up learning? I used to speak it when I was a child. Even now, I wish I could talk to someone who understands my language,” Sen said in Nepali.

Nepal, wedged between China and India, is home to more than 100 ethnic groups speaking as many languages and linguists say at least 10 have disappeared in recent decades.

UNESCO lists 61 of Nepal’s languages as endangered, meaning they are falling out of use, and six, including Kusunda, as “critically endangered”.

“Language is part of culture. When it disappears, the native speakers will not only lose their heritage and history but they will also lose their identity,” said Tribhuvan University linguistics professor Madhav Prasad Pokharel.

“Kusunda is unique because it is not related to any other language in the world. It is also not influenced by other languages,” Pokharel told AFP. “In linguistic terms we call it a language isolate.” Until recently, there were two other native speakers of Kusunda, Puni Thakuri and her daughter Kamala Khatri, but Puni died two years ago and Kamala migrated to India for work, leaving Sen the sole surviving native speaker. Tribhuvan University, in Kathmandu, started up a project 10 years ago to document and preserve Kusunda, inviting Thakuri and Khatri to the Nepalese capital. But as the money ran out, the research ground to a halt.

The project has been given new life by Bhojraj Gautam, a student of Pokharel who recently spent months recording Sen speaking, and gaining the knowledge to speak basic Kusunda himself in the process. As part of the project, funded by the Australian Research Council, Gautam has written down the entire language and the outcome, he says, will eventually be a Kusunda dictionary and a comprehensive grammar. Kusunda, incorrectly first classified as a Tibeto-Burman language, has three vowels and 15 consonants, and reflects the history and culture of its people.

“They call themselves ‘myahq’, which means tiger. That’s because they think themselves as the kings of forests,” Pokharel said.

The origins of the Kusunda people have never been established but they are believed to have lived in the midwestern hills of what is now Nepal for hundreds of years. They traditionally rely on hunting to survive and are adept at using arrows and bows for killing wild animals, with lizards and wild fowl being their meal of choice.

Pokharel said Kusundas have no equivalent of the word “green” because the forest-dwellers are surrounded by vegetation and don’t recognise greenery as something that needs its own word.

The tribe has been dying out for decades, with women marrying outside the blood line, and the language is perishing with it as many take to speaking Nepali.

“The native speakers shifted to other languages. Factors such as marriage outside their tribe, migration and modernisation also contributed to the loss,” Pokharel said.

When King Mahendra dismissed the elected government in 1960 and put in its place an autocratic, partyless system which would govern Nepal for the next 30 years, the use of languages other than Nepali was discouraged.

AFP

Dutch cycling utopia threatened by own success

Problems all-too familiar to car drivers the world over, from traffic jams to road-rage and lack of parking, are now also threatening to turn the Dutch dream of bicycling bliss into a daily hell.

In a small country where bicycles outnumber people by 1.2 million, the Dutch have simply run out of space to accommodate the five million cyclists who take to the road every day, turning commuting in major cities into a nightmare.

In Amsterdam alone 490,000 freewheeling “fietsers” take to the road to cycle a staggering two million kilometres (1.25 million miles) every day, according to statistics released by the city council this week. “Bicycles are an integral mode of transport in our city,” Amsterdam’s council said, but, in a worrying trend, “the busiest bicycle paths are too small for the growing stream of daily cyclists.”

“Cyclists have increased dramatically over the last few years,” Wim Bot of the Dutch Cycling Association (Fietsersbond) agreed.

“In a small country like the Netherlands where almost every square metre is accounted for, we’ve run out of space,” added Bot, whose “cyclists’ union” was founded in 1975 and today represents 35,000 paid-up members.

“It has become a headache,” he told AFP.

AFP